ALVIN JOURNEYMAN

by Orson Scott Card

  They all looked at him like he was a mess on the floor. “How is it Alvin’s call?” asked Verily.

  “That Red chief ain’t dead, is he?” said Arthur Stuart. “That Red prophet what put the curse on, right? Well, him as puts on a curse can take it off, can’t he?”

  “Nobody can talk to them wild Reds no more,” said Mike Fink. “They fogged up the river and nobody can get across. There ain’t even no trade with New Orleans no more, damn near broke my heart.”

  “Maybe nobody can get across the river,” said Arthur Stuart. “But Alvin can.”

  Alvin shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think so. Besides, I don’t know if Tenskwa-Tawa’s going to see things the same way as us, Arthur. He might say, The White people of America are bringing destruction on themselves by choosing White Murderer Harrison to be their leader. But the people of Vigor Church will be saved from that destruction because they respected the curse I gave them. So he’ll say the curse is really a blessing.”

  “If he says that,” said Measure, “then he ain’t as good a man as I thought.”

  “He sees things a different way, that’s all,” said Alvin. “I’m just saying you can’t be sure what he’ll say.”

  “Then you can’t be sure either,” said Armor-of-God.

  “I’m thinking something, Alvin,” said Measure. “Miss Larner here told me somewhat about how she and Arthur figured out there’s a lot of people with sharp knacks in this place. Maybe drawn here cause you was born here, or cause you made the plow here. And there’s all them people you’ve been teaching up in Vigor, folks who maybe don’t got so sharp a knack but they know the things you taught them, they know the way to live. And I also have my own idea that maybe the curse forced us all to live together there, so we had to get along no matter what, we had to learn to make peace among ourselves. If the curse was lifted from the folks of Vigor Church, them as wanted to could come here and teach them as has the knacks. And teach, them meantime how to live together in harmony.”

  “Or folks from here could go there,” said Alvin. “Even if the curse ain’t lifted.”

  Measure shook his head. “There’s like a hundred people or more in Vigor Church who’s already trying to follow the Maker way. Nobody here even knows about it, really. So if you said to the folks in Vigor, please come to Hatrack, they’d come; but if you said to the folks in Hatrack, please come to Vigor, they’d laugh.”

  “But the river’s still fogged up,” said Mike, Fink, “and the curse is still on.”

  “If it comes to that,” said Miss Larner, “there might be another way to talk to Tenskwa-Tawa without crossing the river.”

  “You got a pigeon knows the way to the Red Prophet’s wigwam?” asked Horace, scoffing.

  “I know a weaver,” said Miss Larner, “who has a door that opens into the west, and I know of a man named Isaac who uses that door.” She looked at Alvin, and he nodded.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Measure, “but if you think you can talk to Tenskwa-Tawa, then I hope you’ll do it. I hope you will.”

  “I will for you,” said Alvin. “For your sake and the sake of my family and friends in Vigor Church, I’ll ask even though I fear the answer will be worse than no.”

  “What could be worse than no?” asked Arthur Stuart.

  “I could lose a friend,” said Alvin. “But when I weigh that friend against the people of Vigor and the hope that they might help teach other folks to be Makers and help build the Crystal City—then I don’t see as how I’ve got no choice. I was a child when I went there, though, to that weaver’s house.” He was silent for a moment. “Miss Larner knows the way, if she’ll guide me there.” It was his turn to look at her, waiting. After a moment’s hesitation, she nodded.

  “One way or another, though,” said Verity Cooper, “you will leave this place as soon as the trial’s over.”

  “Win or lose,” said Alvin. “Win or lose.”

  “And if anybody tries to stop him or harm him, they’ll have to deal with me first,” said Mike Fink. “I’m going with you, Alvin, wherever you go. If these people have the president in their pocket, they’re going to be all the more dangerous and you ain’t going nowhere without me to watch your back.”

  “I wish I was younger,” said Armor-of-God. “I wish I was younger.”

  “I don’t want to travel alone,” said Alvin. “Rut there’s work to be done here, especially if the curse is lifted. And you have responsibilities, too, you married men. It’s only the single ones, really, who are free to wander as I’ll have to wander. Whatever I find out at the weaver’s house, whatever happens when and if I talk to Tenskwa-Tawa, I still have to learn how to build the Crystal City.”

  “Maybe Tenskwa-Tawa can tell you,” said Measure.

  “If he knows, then he could have told me back when you and I was boys and in his company,” said Alvin.

  “I’m unmarried,” said Arthur Stuart. “I’m coming with you.”

  “I reckon so,” said Alvin. “And Mike Fink, I’ll be glad of your company, too.”

  “I’m not married either,” said Verily Cooper.

  Alvin looked at him oddly. “Verily, you’re already a dear friend, but you’re a lawyer, not a woodsman or a wandering tradesman or a river rat or whatever the rest of us are.”

  “All the more reason you need me,” said Verily. “There’ll be laws and courts, sheriffs and jails and writs wherever you go. Sometimes you’ll need what Mike Fink has to offer. And sometimes you’ll need me. You can’t deny me, Alvin Smith. I came all this way to learn from you.”

  “Measure knows all I know by now. He can teach you as well as I can, and you can help him.”

  Verily looked at his feet for a moment. “Measure’s learned from you, and you from him, since you’re brothers and have been for a long time. May it not be taken as an offense, I beg you, if I say that I’d be glad of a chance to learn from, you directly for a while, Alvin. I mean to belittle no one else by saying that.”

  “No offense taken,” said Measure. “If you hadn’t said it, I would have.”

  “These three then to go with me on the long road,” said Alvin. “And Miss Larner to go with me as far as Becca Weaver’s house.”

  “I’ll go too,” said Armor-of-God. “Not the whole road, but as far as the weavers. So I can bring back word about what Tenskwa-Tawa says. I hope you’ll forgive my presumption, but I crave the chance to be the one as brings the good news to Vigor Church, if they’re set free.”

  “And if they’re not?”

  “Then they need to learn that too, and from me.”

  “Then our plans are laid, such as they are,” said Alvin.

  “All except how to get out of Hatrack River alive, with all these thugs and ruffians about,” said Verily Cooper.

  “Oh, me and Armor already got that figured out,” said Mike Fink. with a grin. “And we pretty much won’t have to beat nobody to a pulp to do it, neither, if we’re lucky.”

  There was such glee in Mike Fink’s face when he said it, though, that more than one of the others wondered whether Mike really thought it would be good luck not to have to pulverize somebody. Nor were a few of them altogether sure that they didn’t wish to do a little pulp-beating themselves, if push came to shove.

  Fink and Armor-of-God were about to head downstairs with Horace then, to freshen up from their journey before he put them to bed in his attic, a good clean space but one he never rented out, just in case of late-night sudden visitors like these, when Measure called out, “Mike Fink.”

  Fink turned around.

  “There’s a story I got to tell you before I go to sleep tonight,” he said.

  Fink looked puzzled for a moment.

  “Measure’s under the curse,” said Armor-of-God. “He’s got to tell you or he’ll go to bed with bloody hands.”

  “I came this close to being under the curse myself,” said Fink. “But you? How did you get under it?”

&nb
sp; “He took it on himself,” said Miss Larner. “But that doesn’t mean the same rules don’t apply.”

  “But I already know the story.”

  “That’ll make the telling of it easier,” said Measure. “But I got to do it.”

  “I’ll come back up when I’ve peed and et,” said Fink. “Begging your pardon, ma’am.”

  There they were, then, looking at each other, Alvin and Peggy—but once again with Verily Cooper, Arthur Stuart, and Measure looking on.

  “Don’t the two of you get tired of playing out your scenes in front of an audience?”

  “There’s no scene to play,” said Miss Larner.

  “Too bad,” said Alvin. “I thought this was the part of the play where I says to you, ‘I’m sorry,’ and you says to me—“

  “I say to you, There is nothing to be sorry for.”

  “And I say to you, Is so. And you say, Is not. Is so, Is not, Is so, back and forth till we bust out laughing.”

  At which she burst out laughing.

  “I was right, you didn’t need to testify,” Alvin said.

  Her face went stern at once.

  “Hear me out, for Pete’s sake, cause you were right too, if it came right down to it, it wasn’t my place to tell you whether or not you could testify. It’s not my decision whether you get to make this sacrifice or that one, or whether it’s worth it. You decide your own sacrifices, and I decide mine. Instead of me bossing you about it, I should have just asked you to hold off and see if I could manage without. And you would have said yes. Wouldn’t you.”

  She looked him in the eye. “Probably not,” she said. “But I should have.”

  “So maybe we ain’t so bullheaded after all.”

  “The day after—no, two days later—that’s when we’re not so bullheaded.”

  “That’ll do, if we just stay friends till we soften up a little.”

  “You’re not ready for married life, Alvin,” said Miss Larner. “You still have many leagues to travel, and until you’re ready to build the Crystal City, you have no need of me. I’m not going to sit home and pine for you, and I’m not going to try to tag along with you when the companions you need are men like these. Speak to me when your journey’s done. See if we still need each other then.”

  “So you admit we need each other now.”

  “I’m not debating with you now, Alvin. I concede no points to you, and petty contradictions will not be explained or reconciled.”

  “These men are my witnesses, Margaret. I will love you forever. The family we make together, that will be our best Making, better than the plow, better than the Crystal City.”

  She shook her head. “Be honest with yourself, Alvin. The Crystal City will stand forever, if you build it right. But our family will be gone in a few lifetimes.”

  “So you admit we’ll have a family.”

  She grinned. “You should run for office, Alvin. You’d lose, but the debates would be entertaining.” She was turning toward the door when it opened without a knock. It was Po Doggly, his eyes wide. He scanned the room till he saw Alvin. “What are you doing sitting there like that, and not a gun in the room!”

  “I wasn’t robbing any of them, and they wasn’t robbing me,” said Alvin. “We didn’t think to bring guns along.”

  “There was a break-in at the jail. A man claiming to be Amy Sump’s father riled up the crowd and about thirty men broke into the courthouse and overpowered Billy Hunter and took away his keys. They hauled every damn prisoner out of there and started beating on them till they told which one of them was you. I got there before they killed anybody and I run them off all right, but they can’t get far from town in one night and I don’t know but what somebody’s going to tell them where you are so I want you to sleep with guns tonight.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Miss Larner. “They won’t come here tonight.”

  Po looked at her, then at Alvin. “You sure?”

  “Don’t even post a guard, Po,” said Miss Larner. “It will only draw attention to the roadhouse. The men hired to kill Alvin are all cowards, really, so they had to get drunk in order to make the attempt. They’ll sleep it off tonight.”

  “And go away after that?”

  “Make sure the trial is well guarded, and after that if Alvin is acquitted he’ll leave Hatrack and your nightmares will be over.”

  “They broke into my jail,” said Doggly. “I don’t know who your enemies are, boy, but if I was you I’d get rid of that golden plow.”

  “It ain’t the plow,” said Alvin. “Though some of them probably thinks it is. But plow or no plow, the ones as want me dead would be sending boys like those after me.”

  “And you, really don’t want my protection?” asked Doggly.

  Both Alvin and Miss Larner agreed that they did not.

  When Po made his good-byes and was ready to leave, Miss Larner slipped her arm through his. “Take me downstairs, please, and on to the room I’m sharing with my new friend Ramona.” She gave not so much as a backward glance at Alvin.

  Measure hooted once after the door was closed. “Alvin, is she testing you? Just to make sure that you’ll never turn wifebeater, no matter what the provocation?”

  “I got a feeling I ain’t seen provocation yet.” But Alvin was smiling when he said it, and the others got the idea he didn’t mind the idea of sparring with Miss Larner now and then—sparring with words, that is, words and looks and winks and nasty grins.

  After the candles were doused and the room was dark and still, with all of them in bed and wishing to sleep, Alvin murmured: “I wonder what they meant to do to me.”

  Nobody asked who he meant; Measure didn’t have to. “They meant to kill you, Alvin. Does it matter what method they used? Hanging. Burning alive. A dozen musket balls. Do you really care which way you die?”

  “I’d like to have a corpse decent-looking enough that the coffin can be open and my children can bear to look at me and say good-bye to me.”

  “You’re dreaming then,” said Measure. “Cause even right now I don’t know how no wife and children could bear to look at you, though I daresay they’ll say good-bye readily enough.”

  “I expect they were going to hang me,” said Alvin. “If you ever see folks about to hang me, don’t waste your time or risk your life trying to save me. Just come along after they’ve given up on me so you can get me on home.”

  “So you got no fear of the rope,” said Measure.

  “Nor fear of drowning or suffocation,” said Alvin. “Nor falling. I can fix up breaks and make the rocks soft under me. But fire, now. Fire and beheading and too many bullets, those can take me right off. I could use some help if you see them going at me like that.”

  “I’ll try to remember that,” said Measure.

  Monday morning behind the smithy, everyone was gathered by ten o’clock; but from dawn onward, heavily armed deputies were on guard all around the site. The judge arranged things so the whole jury could see, as well as Marty Laws, Verily Cooper, Alvin Smith, Makepeace Smith, and Hank Dowser. “This court is now in session,” said the judge loudly. “Now, Hank Dowser, you show us the exact place you marked.”

  Verily Cooper spoke up. “How do we know he’ll mark the same place?”

  “Cause I’ll dowse it again,” said Hank Dowser, “and the same spot will still be best.”

  Alvin spoke up then. “There’s water everywhere here. There’s not a place you can pick where there won’t be water if you just go far enough down.”

  Hank Dowser whirled on him and glared. “There it is! He’s got no respect for any man’s knack except his own! You think I don’t know there’s water most everywhere? The question is, is the water pure? Is it close to the surface? That’s what I find—the easy dig, the clean water. And I’ll tell you, by the use of hickory and willow wands, that the water is purest here, and closest to the surface here, and so I mark this spot, as I would have more’n a year ago! Tell me, Alvin Journeyman, if you’re so clever,
is this or is it not the same spot I marked, exactly?”

  “It is,” said Alvin, sounding a little abashed. “And I didn’t mean to imply that you weren’t a real dowser, sir.”

  “You didn’t exactly mean not to imply it either, though, did you!”

  “I’m sorry,” said Alvin. “The water is purest here, and closest to the surface, and you truly found it twice the same, the exact spot.”

  The judge intervened. “So after this unconventional courtroom exchange, which seems appropriate to this unconventional courtroom, you both agree that this is the spot where Alvin says he dug the first well and found nothing but solid impenetrable stone, and where it is Makepeace’s contention that there was no such stone, but rather a buried treasure which Alvin stole and converted to his own use while telling a tale of turning iron into gold.”

  “For all we know he hid my iron underground here!” cried Makepeace.

  The judge sighed. “Makepeace, please, don’t make me send you to jail again.”

  “Sorry,” muttered Makepeace.

  The judge beckoned to the team of workingmen he’d arranged to come do the digging. Paying them would come out of the county budget, but with four diggers it couldn’t take long to prove one or the other right.

  They dug and dug, the dirt flying. But it was a dryish dirt, a little moist from the last rain which was only a week ago, but no hint of a watery layer. And then: chink.

  “The treasure box!” cried Makepeace.

  A few moments later, after scraping and prying, the foreman of the diggers called out, “Solid stone, your honor! Far as we can reach. Not no boulder, neither—feels like bedrock if’n I ever saw it.”

  Hank Dowser’s face went scarlet. He muscled his way to the hole and slid down the steep side. With his own handkerchief he brushed away the soil from the stone. After a few minutes of examination, he stood up. “Your Honor, I apologize to Mr. Smith, as graciously, I hope, as he just apologized to me a moment ago. Not only is this bedrock—which I did not see, for I have never found such a sheet of water under solid stone like this—but also I can see old scrape marks against the stone, proving to me that the prentice boy did dig in this spot, just as he said he did, and reached stone, just as he said he did.”